A Fox Butterfield moment at the Drudge Report

One of my favorite daily reads is James Taranto’s Best of the Web Today and one of my favorite features is the section Taranto labels “Fox Butterfield, Is That You?” The reference is to Fox Butterfield, a journalist, who gained fame for labeling as a paradox a statement in which the two factors were manifestly causally related: “More Inmates, Despite Drop In Crime.”

James Taranto finds a lot of those Fox Butterfield statements in the news. Today, I found one hiding in plain sight at the Drudge Report:

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Say there is a country with 1,000 workers (plus another 1,000 or so who are children, or retired, or most important of all, mothers caring for the children).

Let’s say 50 are unemployed. That’s a 5% unemployment rate.

Say there’s a Democrat-induced recession (thank you Messrs.Dodd and Frank) With recession, workers are laid off. Now there are 150 unemployed. That’s a 15% rate on the 1,000 in the workforce.

After enough misery, get discouraged. Say like 110 give up looking for work, just drop out. The Labor Department does some funny arithmetic with that.

The bureaucrats say “Great! That means just 40 workers are looking for jobs (150 jobless less 110 discouraged.) And with 890 labor force (1,000 less 110 discouraged), the unemployment rate has DROPPED to just 4.5% (40 “unemployed” divided by 890 “total” workers). Hooray for us!”

The true unemployment rate is of course 150 jobless out of 1,000 workforce makes 15%. Horrible.

Line U-3 is the “are you evil or just stupid” official number.
Line U-6 is the “Why yes I AM an actuary” true number.

If any on the left want to quibble, glad to delve as deep into the math as they can handle, including “seasonal adjusting,” demography, and all the higher order manipulations by government.

civisisus

you’re a stupid, stupid man if you imagine for a second that our Great Recession somehow was brought about by anything other than Bush Jr’s regime of reactionary stupidity. Anyone with a calendar knows you are stupid, or a liar.

Wow, Civisisus! That was a compelling argument: “Everyone is stupid and bad except for me and my pet political parties.”

We here at the Bookworm Room prefer facts and logic over invective. Unless you have something substantive to offer, complete with facts and intelligent advocacy, I will have to bar you from any further appearances here.

RobertArvanitis

civisisus:

Looks like we need to work on both reading and math skills.

The main topic of the post was the deceptive presentation of
the unemployment rate. The reader is alerted to this point because the topic sentence tells us “Unemployment for the
prenumerate.” That’s why we call it the topic sentence; it tells us what to look for in the article. For some help on this, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_sentence

If the math was a bit hard to follow, we can make it even
more simple: when someone has been unemployed so long that they get discouraged, the Bureau of Labor say that that
is good news. The unemployment rate goes down. Not unemployment, which is people lacking jobs. The rate, which gets better as we start to ignore the unemployed.

Now that we’ve gone over the main topic, let’s turn to the
side issue that seems to have caused a bit of agitation.

The Community Reinvestment Act was passed in 1977, under
Jimmy Carter. This is just one of many government interventions in the housing market – the combined impact of which was drive lending towards ever more unqualified borrowers.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act

We confess the greed of bankers. But we must also note that
we can expect nothing else, when market forces are replaced by the policies of social engineers. To blame Wall St. is like blaming water for finding the hole in the bucket.

2008 “I think that the responsibility that the Democrats had may rest more in resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress, or by me when I was President, to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.” – Former President Bill Clinton, September 25, 2008

We’ve been through a quite a bit of difficult economics here, civisisus, but we do hope that’s a bit more clear. If not, don’t be shy. Let’s hear about what might be still be sticking points in your comprehension, and we can try further remediation.